Posts under ‘Free Speech’

Rebecca MacKinnon: Yahoo! Abomination.: Yahoo! executives keep framing this issue as black and white: Either you’re in there and do everything the Chinese authorities tell you without question, or you can’t do business in China at all. That is false. Companies can and do make choices. You can engage in China and choose not to […]

NY Times: TV Stations Fined Over CBS Show Deemed to Be Indecent. The Federal Communications Commission leveled a record $3.6 million fine yesterday against 111 television stations that broadcast an episode of “Without a Trace” in December 2004, with the agency saying the CBS show suggested that its teenage characters were participating in a sexual […]

George Will: Less Freedom, Less Speech. In 1989, in two speeches in Austria, Irving said, among much else, that only 74,000 Jews died of natural causes in work camps and millions were spirited to Palestine after the war. An arrest warrant was issued. Last November Irving was arrested when he came to Austria to address […]

William J. Bennett and Alan M. Dershowitz: A Failure of the Press. We two come from different political and philosophical perspectives, but on this we agree: Over the past few weeks, the press has betrayed not only its duties but its responsibilities. To our knowledge, only three print newspapers have followed their true calling: the […]

News organizations are beginning to fight back against the absurd and arrogant demands of sports leagues and entertainment conglomerates (often the same entities, in my view). As the Honolulu Star Bulletin notes today, it’s not publishing pictures from the pro golfing tournament being held in its backyard. “The organization wants control over all stories and […]

My colleagues at the Berkman Center, Rebecca MacKinnon and John Palfrey, have penned an op-ed piece for Newsweek’s international edition called “Censorship Inc.” Takeaway: If we’re not careful, we may wake up one day to discover that what a person can see and do on the Web will be radically different depending on which country […]

Terry Heaton: A blogging pioneer calls it quits. And so extortion has won a victory, and the blogosphere has lost a pioneering voice. Peggy is brusk and competitive and has made her share of enemies, but nobody deserves the kind of personal attacks this site apparently distributed. Were the attacks libelous? Or merely insulting? I […]

James Love: A UN/WIPO Plan to Regulate Distribution of Information on the Internet. But what the broadcasters and the webcasters really want has nothing to do with protecting copyrighted works. They want to “own” the content of what they transmit, even when they are not the creative party, and even if they can’t acquire such […]

Global Voices Online has excerpts from Arabic-language blog commentary on the Mohammed cartoon fight.

From the Mohammed Image Archive: While the debate rages, an important point has been overlooked: despite the Islamic prohibition against depicting Mohammed under any circumstances, hundreds of paintings, drawings and other images of Mohammed have been created over the centuries, with nary a word of complaint from the Muslim world. The recent cartoons in Jyllands-Posten […]